NURSES THREATEN TO GO ON STRIKE NEXT WEEK IF ...

NHLANGANO – If negotiations between government and SWADNU do not take place by next week Wednesday, nurses will not be attending to patients.

This was according to the President of the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union (SWADNU), Bheki Mamba, in an interview yesterday. In fact, the whole point was that even if the negotiations eventually take place and there is no positive feedback, they will stop working, and take the ‘fruitless’ meeting report back to court. This follows a verdict in court last Wednesday, which stated that the nurses union and government needed to engage each other, map a way forward and bring a report in two weeks. It is worth noting that the association took government to court over risks they said they were exposed to while in the workplace, among which, was the nurses’ shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Proposal

Mamba stated they had not heard from government since last week  as they were hoping to have received a meeting proposal from the government negotiations team (GNT) chaired by the secretary to Cabinet. He said since they (GNT) were the ones with busy schedules, they were supposed to forward the meeting proposal to the nurses. “If they are still quiet by the time two weeks elapses, we will have no choice, but to go on strike as we have done everything the court told us to do,” narrated Mamba. He stated that it was a cause for concern that government needed to be engaged over PPE and drugs yet COVID-19 cases were escalating. He said if healthcare workers were exposed, as they were recalled to work to strengthen the health system, it meant the whole country was also not safe as they (nurses) were in the frontline.

Doomed

“If government, by now, is not ready for the second wave, it means we are doomed,” he said. He went on to state that the fact that the country was losing people who were key in society to COVID-19, should be an eye-opener for government that it needed a strong healthcare system. Mamba said by now, government was supposed to have announced a reasonable budget for COVID-19, adding that relying on donations was not supposed to be an option. “That would be putting the lives of emaSwati in serious danger, which might even call for them to use informal crossing areas to neighbouring South Africa (SA) for medical attention,” he added.  

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